This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Trisman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Danielle Muinadine read his story, The Golden Boy,

from the December 1st, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Muinadine is the author of the Story Collection in Other Rooms Other Wonders,

which was published in 2009 and won both the Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

His first novel, This Is Where the Serpent Lives, from which this story was adapted, will be published in January.

Now here's Daniel Muinadine.

The Golden Boy

Beazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Raul Pindi.

He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more.

Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that,

and Raul Pindi, a town small enough that a lost little boy should

be found. That was a bitter day, when he accepted years later that there might have been no

hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd. He might have been abandoned, not lost.

Karim Khan, the owner of the tea and curry stall where his known history began, could tell him

only that he had been sitting in front of the stall on a fine winter day, three or four

years old, barefoot and clean, wearing just a shilvarkamese, holding a new pair of cheap

plastic shoes tightly in his arms as if afraid they would be taken away

and scanning the crowds passing by. The shoes had caught Karim Khanzai, not only because they were

brand new, but because the children of the streets, those sparrows, ran barefoot always. In those early

years following the great Indian partition, families drifted

...